Q'd Up

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Who runs this

Twenty years of handing people a microphone.

Q'd Up is a B2B podcast and documentary production company in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. It has been running since 2006. The person who scopes your project is the person who runs the session and sits in the edit.

John Luckenbaugh at the microphone, headphones on, running a session.

Who's in the room

The engineer is me.

I’m John. I’ve been around sound my whole life — a musician first, then a DJ from 1999 (the kind who cued records up by hand, which is where “Q’d Up” comes from), playing everything from clubs to concert halls, and a live sound engineer running broadcasts at WHP and WITF. I started Q’d Up in 2006 and took it full-time producing podcasts and video.

Video came the same way sound did — a little from the broadcast years, a little from the work itself, learned by doing it on real shoots. Over time Q’d Up grew from a recording studio into documentary and multi-camera production: lighting a set instead of a room, cutting a story to a music bed, following a four-year series through a children’s hospital. Audio was the start. Video is where it grew.

When you book a session, I’m the one in the room — setting the levels, running the board or the cameras, and making sure you walk out with something worth editing. Twenty years of handing people a microphone, and a lot of years behind a camera since, means I know how to make anyone sound — and look — like they belong there.

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Before Q'd Up

Where the craft came from

Earlier work and crewed days ran through WITF, C-SPAN, Keystone Pictures, aideM Media, and the Gettysburg Heritage Center, plus federal production for the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The first control room was CAB Studios in Ephrata, long since closed, followed by years of live sound in Lancaster rooms — The SugarTank, the Chameleon Club.

These are not Q'd Up engagements and we list them plainly rather than as clients. But they are why a state agency conference room, a hospital corridor, or a locked-down federal facility is familiar ground rather than a surprise.

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Now

What Q'd Up does

Shows that run for years

A patient-led documentary series with Penn State Health Children's Hospital and Four Diamonds, in continuous production for four years. A cybersecurity interview show past 148 episodes. The hard part is not episode one.

See the full shelf →

Writing about the work

Production Notes — essays on format, craft, and the decisions that actually determine whether something is worth someone's time.

Read the notes →

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Tell us what you're trying to say.

Thirty minutes, no deck. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right shop for it.